Power Hour

Anecdotally, powerful people seem inclined to do certain things (FedEx their luggage, order off the menu, keep immaculate desks) and not to do others (place their own calls, carry cash, learn how to e-mail, admit to sleeping). To academics, one of the best indicators of a person’s place in a hierarchy is his tendency toward “perspective taking”—“stepping outside of one’s own experience and imagining the emotions, perceptions, and motivations of another individual,” as it is defined in “Power and Perspectives Not Taken,” a paper published, in 2006, in the journal Psychological Science. An assistant is perspective taking when he gets the boss’s coffee before he asks for it; when the boss forgets to pay the assistant back the $3.75, he is not.

The hypothesis of the Psychological Science study was that the more power a person has, the less capacity he has to take another person’s perspective. To test the theory, Joe Magee, an assistant professor at the Wagner School of Public Service, at N.Y.U., along with co-authors from Northwestern and Stanford, conducted four experiments. In one, fifty-seven undergraduates were divided into two groups, one whose members were primed to feel powerful by being asked to write about a situation in which they had had dominion over another person. The members of the other, “low power” group were asked to write about an incident in which they had been at another person’s mercy. Each participant was then presented with a set of instructions:

Task 1. With your dominant hand, as quickly as you can, snap your fingers five times.

Task 2. With your dominant hand, as quickly as you can, draw a capital E on your forehead with the marker provided. Don’t worry, the marker is nontoxic, and we will make sure it is removed before you leave today.

There are two ways to draw the “E”: with the prongs of the letter facing so that the person drawing can read it (“self-oriented”), or with the prongs pointing in the opposite direction (“other-oriented”). The researchers concluded that the high-power group was almost three times as likely as the low-power group to draw an “E” that would be illegible to anyone but themselves. (Or: B = -1.51, SE = 0.76, prep = .88.)

An amateur researcher recently decided that theTime100 banquet—champagne, lamb chops, “the most influential people in the world”—held the other night at Jazz at Lincoln Center, would be the perfect occasion for a copycat experiment. The researcher ditched the finger-snapping thing, and armed herself with a royal-blue Flair pen and a fresh pad of periwinkle-colored Post-it Notes. (It was thought that the Magic Marker approach would be pushing it.)

Liz Smith, the gossip columnist, was the first subject. Asked, during the cocktail hour, to stick a Post-it on her forehead and then to draw an “E,” Smith complied, producing a sturdy, outward-facing, relatively powerless vowel. Smith was told that it suggested that she was oriented toward others. She smiled and replied, “Story of my life.”

Standing alone at the bar, Paul Wolfowitz, the spit-combed former Deputy Secretary of Defense and deposed World Bank president, was hesitant about participating, but eventually he agreed, scratching out a shaky, other-oriented “e”: the evening’s first and only lowercase specimen. (He apparently was not demonstrating the “carryover effect,” by which a person who has been stripped of influence continues to behave as if he were still in power.)

Jared Kushner, the publisher of the New York Observer, roped in Ray Kelly, the police commissioner, and his wife, Veronica, who were at the bar awaiting glasses of cranberry juice. Kushner brandished the Flair: an “E,” facing out. The Commissioner also drew an other-oriented “E,” as did Mrs. Kelly, whom he met when he was a lifeguard.

“Mine’s perfect,” Mrs. Kelly teased.

“Better swimmer, too,” the Commissioner said.

It seemed odd that, in a room full of powerful people, no one was acting the way powerful people are supposed to. It was time to ask a member of this year’s Time 100: Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs. Blankfein proved to be an outlier—the sole member of the sample group to yield a potent, self-oriented “E.” “I have a big platform,” he said, sportingly, as he smacked the Post-it on the front of his bald head.

Kristen Wiig and Amy Poehler, from “Saturday Night Live,” were the only partygoers who refused to submit to the experiment. “Why would I want to do that?” Poehler asked. Joe Magee, reached on the phone later, said, “I can’t believe that the ‘S.N.L.’ people didn’t do it,” but he mentioned that, in one of his “E” experiments, seven participants, mostly those from the high-power group, had walked out. He attributed the anomalously unpowerful results of the Time 100 trial to the use of blue Post-its. “Blue creates a negative set of emotions, and when people are experiencing these emotions they think more deliberately,” he said. “If you had used red, it would have gotten at their more spontaneous inclinations.” ♦

Lauren Collins began working at The New Yorker in 2003 and became a staff writer in 2008.